Two competing analytical frameworks for understanding where the Iran campaign stands after the failed Islamabad talks and the initiation of a naval blockade drew sharp responses from Heritage Foundation visiting fellow and retired Army Special Forces Colonel Steven Bucci on Chicago’s Morning Answer Friday morning.
Proft laid out arguments from University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape, who contended that the American campaign has paradoxically set the stage for Iran to become a nuclear-armed oil hegemon and the fourth center of world power within six to twelve months, and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who admitted he wants Iran militarily defeated but finds himself unable to cheer for that outcome because of his personal loathing of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Bucci dispatched both arguments in fairly direct terms. On Pape’s theory, he said the only scenario in which Iran could realistically achieve the nuclear and economic ascendance Pape describes would be if the United States had walked into Islamabad and agreed to every Iranian demand, including Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, unimpeded nuclear enrichment, and a free hand for all of its proxy forces. JD Vance did not do that. He presented the same non-negotiable demands the administration has stated since the campaign began, and when Iran said no, he walked away rather than chasing them the way John Kerry chased the Iranians during the Obama nuclear deal negotiations. The suggestion that Trump or Vance are about to morph into Obama-era appeasers, Bucci said, reflects either wishful thinking from people who want Trump to fail or a fundamental misreading of how this administration operates.
On Friedman’s admission that his hatred of Trump and Netanyahu is so consuming that he cannot bring himself to support an outcome he knows would benefit the Iranian people and the broader Middle East, Bucci said the closest historical parallel is saying Churchill is just a drunk so you are torn about whether to support the Allied cause against Hitler and Mussolini. He said he has generally respected Friedman’s analytical capabilities but called this particular stance insanity, noting that millions of Iranian people living under the worst theocratic regime in the region apparently don’t count because two democratically elected leaders happen to be personally obnoxious to a Pulitzer Prize winner.
The conversation turned to the practical military situation with the blockade now underway, including reports of underwater drones conducting mine-sweeping operations and a Washington Institute analyst’s assessment that more than sixty percent of the Revolutionary Guard’s fast attack craft and speedboat fleet remains intact. Bucci said he has confidence in the Navy’s ability to handle multiple simultaneous tasks, noting that the force is augmented by Marine, Army, and Air Force assets including A-10 Warthogs, Apaches, and other aircraft. Fast attack boats, he said, are not submarines. They cannot hide, they are not armored, and they are essentially World War II-era PT boats that are dangerous primarily when operating against unprepared opponents. Once Trump authorizes the order to sink anything that comes out of Iranian ports before it clears the harbor, he said the threat from that fleet will be eliminated very quickly and the Navy will execute that order effectively.
His strategic vision for the blockade is straightforward: cut off Iran’s oil revenue, force any Iranian military asset that wants to threaten American forces to reveal itself and be destroyed, tighten the noose incrementally, and drive the regime back to the negotiating table on American terms within a compressed timeframe. He said this is not designed to be a months-long open-ended operation but a rapid pressure campaign intended to produce results quickly. He acknowledged that the side effect of tightening the blockade will likely be additional pain at the pump for American consumers, including the removal of the informal arrangements that had kept some oil flowing through the strait to manage global energy prices. He said Americans need to accept that as a necessary cost of a campaign with genuine national security stakes.
Proft raised comments from Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States, Maleeha Lodhi, who told Bloomberg News that the American campaign has underestimated Iranian nationalism just as the United States underestimated Afghan nationalism, and that military supremacy does not automatically translate into achieving political objectives, suggesting the era of American dominance in the Middle East is effectively over. Bucci said the ambassador’s comments might be more aspirational than analytical, noting that the actual behavior of Gulf Arab states tells a directly opposite story. Rather than pulling back from the American coalition and reassessing their bets in light of Iran’s supposed resilience, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf states are moving closer to the United States and Israel and preparing to join the fight more directly. They are doing so, Bucci said, because they understand Iran is the problem in the region and they want to be on the side of the solution.
He said Pakistan’s positioning as a broker in the talks while appearing to lean toward the Iranian side is a strategic error that will energize India, the Gulf Arabs, and others to consolidate more firmly around the American coalition. The coalition of the willing that is assembling around the goal of ending Iranian regional aggression is, in his assessment, growing rather than contracting, and the idea that the combined military might of the United States and Israel has somehow elevated Iran’s regional standing rather than devastated it represents a level of detachment from observable reality that he said he cannot make logical sense of.